For the first time in 15 years, I dug out THE MONKEES box set and watched the whole TV series. Wow. I need to do this more often, like I do with GET SMART and WKRP.
So of course, right after, I watched HEAD. But then, I watched 33-1/3 REVOLUTIONS PER MONKEES, the TV special. Yikes!
I finally read up on it the other day, turns out it was written & produced by the creator of SHINDIG, the short-lived music anthology show that replaced the earlier HOOTENANNY, but was itself replaced (on Thursday nights) by BATMAN. The special struck me as a "psychedelic" update of SHINDIG, and the big question was, what the HELL were The Monkees doing in there? Had they dumped all the "conceptual" garbage and focused just on musical guests and music, it could have been a lot better. Trying to pass it off as a "Monkees" special and then apparently having zero interest in actually featuring The Monkees in it (sort of like what the producers of HEAD did, only far worse, as at least there the group and Jack Nicholson wrote the movie) resulted in a complete disaster.
I think if they were going to have Brian Auger & Julie Driscoll, they'd have done better just to have they performing music. (Driscoll, I've read, is the one whose recording of Bob Dylan's "This Wheel's On Fire" was used as the theme song to the TV series ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS.)
That said, I think this was the first time I've ever watched it back-to-back with ELEPHANT PARTS (1981), and while I've seen EP maybe several dozen times over the years, the over-riding thought in my head the whole time was "This was 100 times better than the '69 special!!"
Indeed, I've read that despite high ratings, The Monkees felt burnt out and couldn't decide on what format they wanted the 3rd season of the TV series to be... so they never did one. Nesmith's mid-80's follow-up, TELEVISION PARTS, showed me just how a 3rd season of THE MONKEES could have been-- a musical-comedy anthology show which would combine music videos by the group and various guest-stars (something they seemed to be leaning toward at the very tail-end of the original show) and comedy bits, also with the group or various guest-stars.
It blows my mind how many people were guest-stars on TP, before they became famous, including Gary Shandling, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld... (Martin Mull, of course, had been around at least since the 70's.)
I don't see why anyone would want the music from the special on CD, but if they did, it would be easy to just copy it straight from the video. I've done that enough time myself, and I'm not even using professional equipment.
